Dr Silvia Masiero was invited to present her latest work on the role of datafication in Indian anti-poverty policy at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) of Tilburg University.

The presentation focused on Dr Masiero’s ongoing work on the role of datafication, a process that renders existing objects, actions and processes into data, within social welfare schemes designed for poor people. The work is led in collaboration with Soumyo Das, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, and draws on the adoption of Aadhaar, India’s biometric population database, within the main national food security programme. Drawing on user narratives, the presentation illustrated a view of datafication as capable of enhancing the effectiveness of anti-poverty schemes, and then problematised it by illustrating multiple issues including informational gaps, restriction of the universal right to food to the enrolled, and exclusion of entitled households from service provision. The discussion revolved around the importance of putting forward a politically embedded view of data, unveiling datafication’s power to reshape the architecture of anti-poverty systems at its very roots.